End of term reports…
UCAS has published its end of cycle report for 2012, the year which its Chief Executive Mary Curnock Cook called “one of the most complex and challenging years for entry to higher education that the sector has ever known.” The headline is that the acceptance rate increased slightly, but only by a fifth of what was needed to offset the fall in applications, and remained substantially below levels of recent years. The fall in acceptances of 27,000 (6%) was the largest recorded. This fall was compounded further by changes in deferral patterns so that recruitment for entry in 2012 was reduced by 54,000 students. Unusually, UCAS has not yet published detailed subject level data. In a HEFCE Circular (18 December) it was announced that universities that failed to fill undergraduate places this year will not generally suffer cuts to their student number allocation next year.
Meanwhile, UUK’s Longer Term Strategy Network released this year’s edition of their annual Patterns and Trends in UK Higher Education report which cautions that “achieving this growth potential will require the university sector and the government to work together to ensure that recruitment activities and migration policies are mutually supportive.” Given the relatively high proportion of students wishing to study engineering in the UK, we can only say “hear hear” to that.
